Irish News, Features & Sport

Research released by the Road Safety Authority at their annual lecture showed that 20% of young drivers have raced on roads in this country.

Young male drivers have emerged from this latest research very badly. The survey of 1,500 drivers show young male drivers reported more speeding, reckless driving and use of mobile phones while driving than other motorists.

The report also found that 5,678 road users aged between 17 and 24 were killed or seriously injured on Irish roads between 1997 and 2009 and more than a third (35%) of those deaths took place between midnight and 5am.

High profile road safety campaigns and the introduction of the points system would appear to have had some positive effect with the number of road deaths for 2011 down on 2010 figures according to Garda statistics. However, despite this, reports of speeding have seen a stark rise.

Convictions for speeding have almost doubled on 2010 figures with over 96,000 people receiving points on their licence in the first four months of 2011.

Elsewhere, incidents of driving while intoxicated have dropped in the past few years with an average of 902 incidents per month reported by Gardai for this year. In 2010, there was an average of 1,000 people caught drink driving per month.

The RSA report was created by Dr. Kiran Sarma, a chartered psychologist and lecturer in psychology at NUI Galway. Dr. Sarma believes these issues with driving on our roads are not merely due to lack of strict penal procedures or speed testing equipment but more so down to people’s attitudes, he said:

“The research would suggest that addressing speeding attitudes is important but that deeper psychological factors are also linked to dangerous driving on our roads.”